Gaillardia grandiflora Arizona Sun photo by Bill Hatcher 2016

Gary Nabhan and I are bumping along in a rental car down a two-track dirt road

that follows the edge of Sonoita Creek’s floodplain, some 29 kilometers north of the Arizona–Mexico border. Nabhan—an ethnobiologist, conservation biologist and agroecologist at the University of Arizona and author of more than 30 books on food, farming and nature—tells me how extraordinary this borderlands region is for pollinators: native bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, even nectar-feeding bats. And now he is giving me a tour to illustrate his point.

Thomae in her garden. photo by Alexis Adams

Raised in this place, Thomae has crafted the cheese since childhood,

and her family—a long lineage of shepherds and cheesemakers—has made it for generations. “I grew up watching my mother make touloumotiri, and helping my father milk the goats and sheep. It’s in my blood,” she tells me during a recent visit. Indeed, the wooden paddle she uses to stir the milk was her mother’s and her grandmother’s before her. The copper colander, now blackened by years of use over a wood fire and, more recently, the propane burner, came with her dowry when she married her shepherd husband, Theodoros, nearly 50 years ago.

Heart Mountain Relocation Center. photo by Vincenzo Spione

The last of the internees left Heart Mountain on Nov. 10, 1945,
three months after Japan’s surrender.

They
were given $25 and a one-way ticket to anywhere in the United States. For most, there was no place and nothing to return to, for when they were “evacuated”in 1942, they were forced to selloff their homes, farms, shops, furnishings, and clothing — all of the possessions that would not fit into that single suitcase.

Ballas and the author's daughter score incisions in the mastic bark. photo by Dimitris Maniatis

Standing in the cool of the grove, we listen as Ballas describes the fables and songs

that have been inspired by the mastic tree, and I am impressed by the affect the resin has had on the culture of this eastern Aegean island. In fact, it occurs to me, it is mastic resin that has literally
shaped the history and architecture of the southern half of Chios. By the 14th century, mastic had become so coveted and valuable that the Genoese conquered the island to gain control of thetrade. It was the Genoese who built the Mastichochoria, the 24
mastic villages scattered around southern Chios, in order to protectthe mastic harvest and the farmers without whose expertise, cultivation would decline.